Or appreciated someone on your staff just for bringing their creativity to work every day?

Or even thanked someone for bringing up an unpopular but important topic?

It’s well-documented that cultivating a practice of gratitude is good for you, your health, and your relationships. Did you know that gratitude is great for your team too? When you express heartfelt gratitude to your co-workers, they experience an increased sense of self-worth and value to the company. When people feel valuable, they treat each other with more respect.

But the benefits don’t stop there. When your team develops a habit of finding real things to feel grateful about, their ability to weather the inevitable storms together also increases. Bam! Resilience!

I’m Grateful for You!

I am grateful that you are out there making the world a more creative, more engaged, and more meaningful place to work. I am also grateful that you support Radically Human’s work. We stand on the shoulders of giants and are grateful that you are part of this community. THANK YOU!

As leaders we have a vision for the future — of our team, our product, our organization — that we are passionate about. We can see it in our minds, we can imagine the possibilities. We craft it and polish it and present it to our team like a precious object. We hope — and often we demand — that they pick it up and love it, too.

Then they just shrug their shoulders and go back to what they were doing.

Put yourself in their shoes. You’ve just sat through a presentation, or a conversation, or a concept video. You’ve come to this meeting which is one of 6 other meetings that day. You’ve heard, yes, an exciting presentation. Or at least one the leader seems passionate about. You have a hundred questions, not the least of which is: what does this have to do with me? My job? My career? The other twenty things on my plate?

The trouble is, when introducing a vision for the future, we tend to skip some really important steps. When you want someone to engage with your vision, you have to involve them in it. It’s not just a nice to have. It’s imperative. It’s true, you could treat them like a pair of hands, “leverage” them like widgets. But you won’t get the creativity, the desire, the strength you are hoping for unless each person can see themselves in the vision.

These involvement steps take time. Figure that into your timeline. If you don’t involve others in the early rollout of a vision, if you cheat time, you’ll pay for it later. One hundred times over.

Show your work

Don’t just share your vision – give people the same information you used to come up with the vision in the first place. What was the thought process you went through? What crucial pieces of information really pushed you in this direction? Talk it through with them.

Give people time to process

It took you time to come to this conclusion. Why wouldn’t it take others time, too? Don’t expect your team to just jump at your idea immediately. Share your vision with them initially, then do it again a week later. Ask people to think it over in the interim, to bring questions to the next session.

Plan a rollout program, not a rollout presentation

Most people – myself included – get so wrapped up in the vision, the story, the idea, that they forget that change takes time. It’s a multi-step process. Think about the result you are going for and work backwards from there. Use all the participatory, Lean UX, and facilitation tools in your toolkit. If you are asking people to make a big change in their behavior, expect that to take some time, and a creative approach.

Share your vision early and often

Don’t wait until your vision is perfect to share it. Guess what. It won’t ever be perfect. If you keep it too close to your chest for too long, you may come up with exactly the wrong thing. Or you may become too protective of it. Share it with people informally. Have conversations. Invite people to be part of the process early on.

Ask people what they think

Assume that the involvement of others will only make the idea stronger. Ask. Share. Listen carefully.

Show people where their ideas have made an impact

When you solicit feedback, don’t just take it and run. Go back to the people you spoke with and show them how their ideas have been incorporated. Appreciate them. Tell them the impact their thinking has had on the direction of the project.

Ask people how they see themselves in it

In order for people to be engaged with something, they need to see themselves in it. This might range from “what’s in it for me” to “what will this require of me.” Don’t assume, though. Ask. The answers may surprise you. Incorporate the answers.

Involve but lead

Finally, with all this talk about involvement, don’t lose sight of the fact that you are, in fact, leading this vision. You are capable of discernment, of making strong choices. Involvement doesn’t mean design by committee. Don’t be a people pleaser. Hold the outcome, the result at the forefront of your mind, and act with strength.

Last Thursday, my nephews and niece started at a new school. It’s been a long summer and I can hear my sister breathe a sigh of relief from clear across the country.

Back-to-school is the real New Year. Think about it. Companies start new projects, slow projects suddenly speed up, people get new jobs or renew their commitment to their current job. Instead of making doomed resolutions, you sharpen your pencils, gather your supplies and dig in. The party’s over and now it’s time to work.

Back-to-school can feel melancholy, but this relationship and creativity nerd sees an upside. This is the time of year when relationships, especially for kids, get a whole new energetic push. Back-to-school means re-connecting with your old friends. Back-to-school means new friendships. Allegiances change, friends grow apart or come back together.

With change in the air, you, my perceptive Creative Leader, can use this seasonal cycle to grow your relationship wisdom. Why not take some time today to examine the professional relationships around you. Who’s new? Who’s been around for awhile? Who has drifted away? And who are you unbelievably excited to start working with?

A diagrammatic trip down memory lane

When I first dreamed up this topic, I was feeling nostalgic for the first day of school. (I grew up in an idyllic, diverse small town, and went from nursery school to 10th grade with basically the same 80 people.) As I mentally stepped through the grades, I diagrammed the relationships.

And then I analyzed. I noticed a couple of things.

First, I saw the literal relationships. I was friends with this person, then that person, then this group, etc.

Second, I noticed that each combination had a distinctly different energy to it. With the boys (yes, I was a huge tomboy), we ran around creating adventures, liberating prisoners, storming castles, and just running. With the girls, we spent hours making movies, discussing books, and writing plays. Later, with mostly that same group of girls, hormones re-focused our energy outward on social engagement (boys, cruising, trouble). Along the way, I noticed, I always had a special partnership – someone with whom I was really close and trusted completely.

Third, I noticed my role in each relationship changed. Sometimes I lead, sometimes I followed, sometimes I felt in them and other times on the outside. Sometimes we walked along hand-in-hand or giggled like a gaggle of geese down Main Street. (And yes people, I literally mean Main Street.)

Activity time! Grab some paper and a pen.

Yay! It’s time to diagram your own schoolyard history. Grab some paper and a sharpie and start mapping it out. It doesn’t really matter how you do it – follow your intuition. You can go crazy if you want, pilfering from old school yearbooks or just use stick figures. Glue, yarn, Illustrator. Doesn’t matter.

Once you have your history mapped out, go back through each group and ask yourself:

what was the energy of this group like? what did it feel like to be part of the group?

how did you feel when you were with this group of people? did that feeling change over time?

Now, admittedly, memory isn’t always accurate, but I am pretty sure that if you close your eyes and put yourself back in that classroom, or on that playground, or in that car filled up with menthol cigarette smoke (just kidding, mom!), you’ll bring back some of these feelings. The feelings will be close enough for jazz, as they say.

Why this matters

“Yeah, ok,” you might be thinking, “That was fun, I guess. But how does this help me?”

As Creative Leaders, we need to be highly skilled in emotional intelligence and social intelligence. But, we also need to be skilled in a third intelligence that you may not be as familiar with, called Relationship Systems Intelligence (RSI). With RSI, you look not only at how individuals interact, but you understand that there is another force at play in any relationship. That force, the Relationship System, is more powerful than the sum of its parts, and it influences group members as much, or more, than any individual.

1+1≠2.

1+1=3.

There are a variety of tools, like this one, that I use to help my clients develop their RSI so they can more effectively set their teams up to succeed. By visualizing the relationship system, they gain greater awareness of the dynamics at work, which in turn makes them wiser and better able to shepherd their team through uncertainty.

Now you! Do it!

Can you take the exercise we did today and apply it to your workplace? What would happen if you mapped workplace relationships over time? And what would the revealing of those patterns teach you about who your team is and where it is going?